Human Flower Project

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Cycling to Ashwell, Two Gardens

John Levett rides south of Cambridge to see what generations of nickings, seed droppings, and skill have made: the expected and the surprising.

Spring at Docwra’s Manor House, Shepreth, England
Photo: John Levett

By John Levett

I cycle a lot. It’s what I used to do as a kid. Stopped. Then started again forty years later. When I was growing up in South London in the 50s I used to walk over to Lewisham some Saturday mornings, up Loampit Hill then down Tanners Hill into Deptford. Just before hitting Deptford Broadway there’s a small turning and there used to be Witcomb’s cycle shop. I went there to watch the frame builders. They had four or five in those days plus a racing team. Most famously, Stan Britten rode a Witcomb in the 1958 Tour de France. He finished in 69th spot but a Brit taking part in those days was a moment of wonder. I’d get a Witcomb when I went out to work (it said on my list of what to do with money when I got some).

Fast forward forty years to 2001. I decided I wanted a road bike to add to my workhorse that got me places but not fast (nor stylishly) enough and it was then that Witcomb came back into mind. Did they still make bikes? Did they still exist? Never mind looking it up; I hadn’t been down to Deptford for decades. I travelled down from Cambridge at Easter that year, tube to New Cross Gate and down New Cross Road. Still there and as small and grubby as ever it was and Dad Witcomb still behind the counter.

The Witcomb, parked in the garden at Level Crossing, May 2008
Photo: John Levett

To cut to the end I got the bike I wanted as a kid. Made to measure, full road spec, Witcomb lilac and black head tube just like Stan’s. Part of my history. It took until October for Barrie Witcomb (my age, ex-racer, sole frame builder) to complete the bike but I took possession a few days before I had to undergo radiography treatment at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Each afternoon, after treatment, I took Witcomb out into the Fens and rode through a perfect Autumn.

I love the Fens in any season and they’re not as featureless as pictured; the surprise of villages, the washes, remnants of farmsteads, the island settlements, the Ely towers, trails where there’s nothing and nobody—rare in this part of the kingdom. But no hills.

I often ride over into Essex for variety around Thaxted, Dunmow and the North Weald but my favourite detour is up to the Cambridgeshire hills overlooking Duxford and then over the Hertfordshire border to Reed; Therfield (one of the beacon hills of 1588 announcing the sighting of the Spanish Armada); Kelshall at the eastern end of the Chilterns near Royston; then dipping down into Ashwell whose spring sources the Cam. The church is fine, has a mason’s scratching of the original St. Paul’s cathedral before the Great Fire and graffiti recording the Black Death of 1349. My route from Ashwell back to Cambridge passes through Shepreth (‘the brook in which sheep are dipped’). It’s got two gardens worth a stop; for different reasons.

Hemerocallis Fulva points the way to the Manor House, Docwra
Photo: John Levett

Docwra’s Manor House is 17th. century. Its garden’s got a formal informality. Let me explain. When I was learning history one of my teachers was WG Hoskins whose most widely read publication was The Making of the English Landscape; a fine television series came out of it too. He took us out into the Leicestershire countryside and demonstrated how everything that looks natural was in fact built, contrived, purposely located and served a variety of economic, political and social interests. I get that feeling about Docwra’s. It feels too much like how a manor house garden should look; even down to the seat, the sharpening stone, the water butt. On a blisteringly hot day you could think yourself into The Go-Between.

This might seem to be knocking the gardening skills that have gone into its creation. My problem (if problem it is) has always been that, whichever season I’ve been there, I’ve found whatever I’ve expected to find. For me, surprises have been few. Nonetheless, I love going there. Sometimes I like comfortable recognition. I love the mix, the heights, the turns, the contrived skill of the planting.

Docwra’s gardens: successful “experiments”
Photo: John Levett

Docwra’s represents what many gardeners (especially in England) aspire to: a garden that reflects the gardener’s ease and casual facility; an almost-inconsequential dropping of a seed here a cutting there; an accepting awareness that one experiment will succeed, another fail and in the scheme of things all moments pass. Gardening by walking about. Plantings merge. Seed drops. Confusion’s eased into what fits. Sorted.

I contrast it to Beth Chatto’s garden (or gardens) at Elmstead Market in Essex. My Uncle Syd used to live in Brightlingsea nearby and when I visited we often wound up there. (Syd left England in the 1930s for the States, going from one depression to another, looking for work and started off as a seller of Mazawattee tea. He finished up as butler to the Bloomingdales and often featured as a model in adverts in the photogravures of the ‘50s advertising pool-side drinks or crisp, white shirts. He bore a passing resemblance to Alfred, butler to Adam West’s Batman.) Anyway...I first went to Beth Chatto’s in the early ‘80s and got thrilled, bought more than I could afford and wanted back to spend more. It was some years later but by then the commercial side seemed to be doing the driving and a supporting contrivance dominating. I know all gardens are contrivances but this seemed to be up front and centre.

Level Crossing, where the rail line crosses Ashwell Road
Photo: John Levett

Docwra’s has the advantage of being just a garden; no ‘Buy one get one free’ of anything. It has confusion too; it’s part of its artifice. A near neighbour has it as well.

The Level Crossing garden is a couple of hundred yards down the road from Docwra’s; at the apex of a triangle formed by Ashwell road and the main line Great Northern railway. These crossings used to be hand operated; gardening was no doubt a way of passing time between trains. I’ve often passed it on a ride but only rarely stopped.

There’s a recognizable trend in urban gardens these days not just for off-the-shelf-as-seen-on-TV gardens but for if-it’s-too-small-pave-it-or-chip-it-over approaches. Thankfully there are still many who see small as challenging—what works, what might work, what’s worth a try, that’s-too-big-but-I-love-it, that’s-too-small-but-it’ll-give-a-season. Cookery.

Level Crossing garden, nothing wasted
Photo: John Levett

Once, there used to be a generation of gardeners who thrived on nicking cuttings (pinchings more likely) from roadsides, other people’s front gardens, stately homes, next door neighbours. It made sense. There might have been a local nursery but unlikely, probably a greengrocer who doubled up on seed packets, possibly a corn chandler who’d do seed potatoes and onion sets in season but many gardeners just picked up plants on the fly or exchanged on the allotment. It was part of communality; but communality needs time to give and stay awhile with neighbours. That’s becoming scarce.

Level Crossing always strikes me as a throw-back to such a time. Nothing wasted, its meanderings Looking-Glass like, its confusions essential. It’s the sort of garden you’d walk daily and recognise something planted seasons ago and forgotten, smile and congratulate yourself on your prime competence.

A lesson in planning
Level Crossing
Photo: John Levett

There is also a confident plan to the garden. I could be wrong but it’s not as casual as it looks. It’s a small plot but the paths that almost turn back on themselves, the siting of bowers & the space beyond that they suggest, the just-slightly enclosed seating, the taller plantings that ‘hedge’ a small bed , the pottings that fill any spare space — create an available space seemingly greater than its extent. That’s always a lesson in Garden Planning 101 but so difficult to achieve in common practice.

I also get the feeling there’s an element of ‘Thrive or Die’ about some of the plantings. We’ve all done it: the must-have that universal experience says is a plant-death waiting to happen but we plant it anyway. I’m reminded of H. persica which is a native of Iran and Afghanistan and was mightily difficult to keep alive in Europe. (John Lindley 1829 “Drought does not suit it, it does not thrive in wet; heat has no beneficial effect, cold no prejudicial influence; care does not improve it, neglect does not injure it.”) Jack Harkness brought it to Hitchin in Hertfordshire the early’ 60s from seed given by Alex Cocker in Aberdeen—it thrived; crossing with such as ‘Canary Bird,’ ‘Cornelia,’ ‘Margo Koster,’ ‘Roseraie de l’Haÿ.’ (I think ‘Euphrates’ was Harkness’s first commercial child in 1986). One feels anything from central Asia would have the same success in Shepreth.

The comfort of a welcome, Level Crossing
Photo: John Levett

There’s another historical comfort to Level Crossing—its openness. Until recently (and in neighbourly streets you still can) you stuck your head into someone else’s garden, walked around, stopped awhile, moaned about the weather and the price of stuff, remembered before the war, swapped plants, gave out left-overs. There’s less of that now; we’re too busy on these islands. Level Crossing’s one of those spots you can stick your nose into; there’s no feeling of taking up someone else’s time. In the housing block where I live, three of us are gardeners and one tries (I take an Aristotelian view of that—to try is to succeed). We won’t win prizes but none are bothered; it’s all in the doing and the sharing; the giving and the trading; the stopping and the nattering. When I walked around Level Crossing it felt like next-door’s garden. But for the train.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Warm the Cacti, Cool the Computers

An Indiana city saves on heating, while the university pays less to chill its super computers. Kiss your brain!

Computer scientist 
Paul Brenner of Notre Dame explains how the university’s computers and the city’s desert plants will make beautiful climate together.
Photo: University of Notre Dame

Better than a stroke of genius, here’s a spike of conservation brilliance.

The University of Notre Dame’s computer experts have teamed up with botanists of South Bend, Indiana, to save energy. They’re moving several of the university’s 400-pound computer processors into the city’s Arizona Desert Dome.

The computers shed heat, which is just dandy with the cacti and other Southwestern plants, and air circulating through the 26,000-square-foot greenhouse will help cool the machines. Big computers like these are very expensive to keep cool. “According to The South Bend Tribune, the plan will save the university about $100,000 in utility costs, even after the university pays for the electricity to power the processors.” Nobody knows yet how much the computers’ warmth will save the city, but last year South Bend’s parks department spent $70,000 to heat the desert dome and other conservatories.

According to Kathleen, a South Bend blogger and conservationist, this region of Indiana “relies heavily on coal-powered generators for electricity,” so this Desert Dome/Computer partnership should reduce emissions from burning coal, heating the desert greenhouse while cutting down on greenhouse gases.

This forward-thinking human flower project grew out of the city of South Bend’s commitment to climate protection. Last month, South Bend became one of 800 Cool Cities dedicated to reducing the causes of global warming.

With amaryllis looking on inside the Potawatomi Park Greenhouse, Mayor Stephen Luecke (right) is honored by Christine Fiordalis and Steve Francis of the Sierra Club. South Bend became a “Cool City.”
Photo: Kathleen, If We Only Connect

“This Green computing initiative proves that global challenges can bring out the best of our creativity,” said Mayor Stephen Luecke, “especially when the public and private sector join together to find solutions. It is only the latest of a history of ventures by the City of South Bend to reduce our carbon footprint and make a real difference for the future of our planet.”

Couldn’t such a climate partnership work between any botanical garden (or private business) with greenhouses to heat and any company or institution with computers to keep cool? Congratulations to scientists of Notre Dame and the city of South Bend. May your initiative spike others into collaboration.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Flower Electioneering: You Be the Judge

Did $11 arrangements break Oregon elections law? We plead the case of one judicial candidate.

Mr. F.E. Smith, lawyer
Could you buy his vote
with one pink rose?
Drawing: Vanity Fair/SPY
via Antique Maps and Prints

Flower power is very real - and chancy, working less like a strategic missile than a heap of gunpowder. BOOM, sometimes. But more often you get kablooey!

So discovered Doug McGeary, a lawyer in southern Oregon, who “deployed” $11 arrangements in his campaign to be Jackson County Circuit Court Judge.

In Oregon, the state bar association polls local attorneys on their preferences among judicial candidates, then makes those preferences public before election day. McGeary’s campaign advisor recommended that he send flowers to 25 law firms in the area as “modest floral reminders” intended to “get out the vote.” McGeary won the April poll of lawyers, by the way; according to reporter Sanne Specht, he pulled in 110 votes, many more than either of his two opponents (71 and 23 votes apiece).

But since learning of the floral gifts, one of McGeary’s opponents is calling the lawyers’ poll “tainted.” The flower strategy that first looked like a political bull’s eye now is careening like a wild pitch. The state of Oregon, like most others, prohibits any gift giving that could smack of vote-buying. What, exactly, smacks like that? According to a state election official, “Frisbees, hats and postage stamps” are out of bounds, but “balloons, bookmarks and pens are allowed.” What about nail files or cigars? What about bubble gum cigars, then? And what about flowers? Oregon law, it appears, is silent on any of them.

Doug McGeary and family (and flowers)
Photo: Doug4Judge

We aren’t eligible to vote in Oregon, but we would like to speak up on Doug McGeary’s behalf. Foremost, he seems to be someone who sincerely likes flowers. Check out this photo from his campaign website showing McGeary and the family, a bunch of placards flung around, and a folding table with a vase of flowers. Nice touch, Doug!

Second, Oregon election officials should note that in both Texas and Florida, flowers get a bye, at least on the opening day of the legislature. See our story on Florida here.

An arrangement priced at $18.50
delivery cost not included
Image: Flower Magik

And third, consider for a moment what sort of arrangement $11 will buy. We actually couldn’t even find one that, uh, “inexpensive” on any online florist’s site. The closest was this $18.50 selection: three pink (or lavender) roses, and bit of greenery in a glass cylinder. That price doesn’t include the delivery fee, by the way. Reasonably, we’d guess that for $11 a pop, Doug might have been able to send one rose or a couple of sprigs of alstromeria to each of these 25 law firms.

Now, think about the last time you were in a law office...and think about the lawyers you know. How big an impact could a floral arrangement on this scale have in one of those wood-paneled caverns? And when was the last time your lawyer friends were impressed, by ANYTHING?

Your Honor: the defense rests.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Altitude Fear & Latitude Envy

The saturated colors of mountain flowers are legendary, but are they worth an anxiety attack? We search for a flatter alternative.

Ryuzu falls and mountain flowers, 1997
Nikko National Park, Japan
Photo: Kohei Tanaka

We are alpi-phobic…Something about having grown up on the banks of a huge, sluggish river, maybe, or hearing one too many Appalachian folk songs where a woman’s dragged into the hills and smashed in the head with a rock. For us, just the idea of driving “into the mountains” tightens the throat.

After reading about flower color today, though, we have reason to overcome this neurosis.  EarthScholars Jim Wandersee and Renee Clary wrote in their essay on the floral spectrum several months back: “More vivid colors are seen in cooler stands of flowers growing in places like Alaska. The intensely bright fuchsia of fireweed flowers makes driving Alaskan highways ‘a journey into the Land of Oz.’”

Gentians at 12,000 feet
on Cheli La Pass, Bhutan
Photo: Nancy Holyoke

Nancy Holyoke sent us a photo of gentians she spotted in Bhutan, a blue the likes of which we’ve never seen on even the most psychedelic morning glory. Wouldn’t this be worth suffering through the claustrophobic shudder that steep slopes bring on?

Like a lot of folks, in and out of lederhosen, we’d assumed that tropical flowers (like the hibiscus blooms you see on Hawaiian shirts) were the brightest of all, but that’s not so. “Twelve years of observation among the vegetation of the eastern and western tropics,” wrote A.R. Wallace, “has convinced me that this notion (of more colorful tropicals) is entirely erroneous.”

“The beauty of alpine flowers,” Wallace noted, “is almost proverbial. It consists either in the increased size of the individual flowers, as compared with the whole plant, in the increased intensity of color, or in the massing of small flowers into dense cushions of bright color. It is only on the higher alps above the limits of frosts, and upward towards the perpetual snow line that these colors are fully exhibited.” We have a sick headache.

Another 19th century botanist, “M. Flahault in going north from France noticed in Zeeland that many flowers had already brighter colors. In Norway the colors of nearly all flowers were brighter, and he gives a list of 16 native and 12 cultivated plants in which this difference was especially marked. He also caused seeds of 14 species to be sown the same season in Paris and at Upsal in Sweden, with the result in each case but one of brighter colors in the northern locality.”

-- from Arthur Alger Crozier’s opus: “The Modification of Plants by Climate (1885)

We’d brave quite a lot to see intensely beautiful flowers, but before we invest in hiking boots, there may be another way.

An inkling came in a note this morning from our cousin, painter Melinda Waring. “All you artists out there,” she wrote, “will understand, when I say an overcast day has more light than a sunny day.” And then we retrieved this long treasured post card of Van Gogh’s bulb field

Flower Beds in Holland
by Vincent van Gogh (1883)
Image: National Gallery of Art

The sapphire blues, golds, whites (and one patch of lavender) are brighter for the two brown barns anchoring each side of the painting, a fringe of dark hills in the distance, and the very cloudy skies.

For a more contemporary view of the same phenomenon, here’s a photo from the Dutch government.

A tulip field, with lilies and narcissus in Northern Holland
Photo: Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs

This region of Northern Holland is of course one of the most popular floral tourist attractions all year, anywhere in the world. Even though Holland’s tulip bulb industry is dwindling (gradually migrating from the Netherlands to Poland and facing competition from China), The Keukenhof, in Lisse, still draws 700, 000 visitors each year. The tulip season there is just winding down.

Could it be that the qualities Wallace attributed to alpine height were really the effects of distance from the equator, of northerliness – of perception? Certainly the EarthScholars’ example of color intensity, Alaskan fireweed, could help make that case. As could M. Flahaut’s investigations, Paris to “Upsal.”

As a flower lover, we will trek for color. But as a flatlander, we’d like to begin our quest for intensity via latitude (and cloud cover) rather than by taking on altitude. Let’s keep in mind the Dutch, including Vincent.  Instead of boots, we’ll buy a locket and fold in it this heartening observation from the mighty Felder Rushing, a fellow Southerner, likewise in search of more vivid flowers:

Holland is “farther north than Nova Scotia…. The angle of the sun is so low way up there, colors get ‘punched up’ and seem more vivid than they do in our muggy heat, which washes out a lot of the blue and green. Same thing in England, New England and British Columbia. Because of the climate, many plants grow better. And because of the angle of the sun, they simply look better.”

Sunday, May 04, 2008

Proto-Peony Pilgrim, at Ashland

Too early for the flower show, but just in time for a zillion blinking buds.

Cyndy Clark overlooks the heavily budded peony bed
at Ashland, the Henry Clay home, Lexington, KY
Photo: Human Flower Project

Religious pilgrims go in certainty; they know the saint’s fingerbone, kept in a golden box since the second century, will be there at the cathedral, whenever they arrive. It’s floral pilgrims who need faith or, short of that, an open-mind. The forsythia’s over, and so are the weeping cherries, but you had forgotten about lilacs. The peonies aren’t in their glory, but the buds are.

With friend and gardener Cyndy Clark, we made our pilgrimage to the big peony garden at Ashland, a historic home in Lexington, Kentucky, one week ago. Only five or six beautiful clumps were flowering; most of the garden was leafy and covered with huge plump buds.

Bud with juice, and bloom, Ashland, Lexington, KY
Photo: Human Flower Project

The Garden Club of Lexington installed the bricklined peony beds in 1986. “Dozens of Saunders hybrid peonies were donated by Bobbi Van Meter in honor of her mother, Alice McIlvain Prewitt, owner of Walmac Farm.” Mrs. Prewitt had been a longtime member of the club, which maintains the walled garden at Ashland, too.

A.P. Sauders was an early peony hybridizer from Canada.  We wish we could tell you names of these particular cultivars, in bud and in bloom, but we found no tags anywhere (it really wouldn’t be in keeping with Lexington style, you know).

Now about those buds…Some, tight and green, looked like brussell sprouts – has anyone ever eaten one and can account for how they taste? Others buds were blinking, “tears” at the edge of chartreuse, pink, and wine-purple eyes. A few more had cracked like eggs, with pink, cupped feathers lifting open.

True peony lovers know that different varieties open at different times through the season (generally early May through early July). For the peony gluttons out there (count us in!) here’s a website that purports to offer a seven week cycle of flowers, with varieties grouped by their bloom dates. Florists are intensely interested in the habits of peony buds, too, as these prized cut-flowers ship at bud stage.

The most curious feature of the Ashland peony garden is what’s NOT there – ants – even though many hundreds of buds were secreting shiny syrup.

Our mother’s peonies in Louisville have always had ants circumnavigating the buds. We’d thought that ants were somehow good for these flowers. (Peony buds attract wasps, too.)

Ants aplenty on Anne Ardery’s peonies, in Louisville, Kentucky
Photo: Human Flower Project

“The garden myth is that peonies need ants on them in order for the buds to open properly,” wrote Hanna at This Garden is Illegal, in May 2006. “This is not true. A peony bud will open just as well with or without the ants.” She goes on to write that the ants do prey on other insects that can be harmful to peonies. So perhaps it’s “mythological” in the best sense: true, but not widely understood.

One of the early Saunders peonies at Ashland, April 27, 2008
Photo: Human Flower Project

Today we imagine that Ashland’s garden is in full blowsy flower, swarming with people. Henry Clay, the Kentucky politician who once lived here, is famous for telling his fellow U.S. Senators: “I had rather be right than president.”

REALLY, Henry? Well, you got at least half your wish. Loving the garden in bud, we can’t go so far as preference. We had rather found the peonies in bloom.

Friday, May 02, 2008

How Does Your Garden Reblog Grow?

With book clubs, meet-ups, and contests, the field of garden weblogging is now a thicket of online writers and photographers. Reblogging sites that collect posts from other blogs have helped bring the field into focus, partly by raising questions of copyright and profitability. Caren White, editor of one of the first garden reblogs—Garden Voices—talks about what’s happened and where it all may be heading.

Back in late 2005, we were contacted by a fellow named Joshua Mack about whether we’d like Human Flower Project to be included in a compendium of weblogs, a new venture called Garden Voices that was branching off of gardenweb.com. This popular spot where gardeners shared advice and photos had recently been purchased by iVillage, an online media group targeting women.

We were flattered and—as the flattered should always be—leery. Human Flower Project, many days, has little to do with gardening. And there was a more craven concern: Did it make sense to turn our unpaid labor and thought over to a for-profit enterprise, one featuring makeup tips and stories titled “Do You Cook Better Than His Mom?” —especially when we wouldn’t share in any of those profits? 

Eventually we settled on what seemed reasonable terms—Garden Voices would post our headlines and subheads but no photos or stories in full, provided they’d include a link back to Human Flower Project (other blogs apparently have other arrangements). There were a few bumps along the way, but eventually things smoothed out, thanks to Caren White of Middlesex, New Jersey. Caren, with her own A Gardening Year site, tends the Garden Voices reblog, and has been unfailingly accommodating.

Garden Voices, a compilation of hundreds of gardening weblogs, began in 2005
Image: Garden Voices

And so it went for over two years. Until late January 2008. For several weeks Garden Voices, which had grown into an international choir of weblogs, shriveled to a few squeaks and then went dumb.

When we wrote Caren to ask what was happening, even she was perplexed. Was Garden Voices malfunctioning, on hiatus or plain dead?

NBC/Universal had acquired iVillage for $600 million in 2006; by early this year there were lots of pieces moving on the corporate chessboard. The new management tried an iVillage TV show, which was cancelled in March. Thirteen iVillage employees lost their jobs earlier this year, and the remaining ones were shuffled from the New York offices to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The Healthology website (purchased for $17.2 million in 2005) was discontinued; would Garden Voices be next?

The site is back up and running now. But during the uncertain weeks of February we corresponded with Caren, taking the vagaries of the reblog as an opportunity to learn about Garden Voices. We asked Caren about the set-up of the site, its past (since in February its future was an open question) and her outlook on the gardening blogsphere. With many thanks to Caren, here you have it:

HFP: When did Garden Voices begin and how? What was the motivation behind the site?

Caren White: Garden Voices was begun late in 2005.  I can’t speak to how or why it was launched.  Joshua Mack who headed the team who developed and ran the site has left iVillage for personal reasons.  I do know that he had originally intended that it be a “blog about blogs”.  This wasn’t communicated clearly to me at first so I came up with my own concept of what it should be and ran with it.

When I began garden blogging in 2005, there were not a lot of garden blogs and the few that were out there were difficult to find.  I wanted to create a site where anyone interested in reading garden blogs would be able to find blogs on any topic related to gardening from anywhere in the world.  I deliberately reached out to bloggers outside of the US because I was interested in gardening outside of the US.  It took about a year, but I reached my goal of having blogs from every continent except Antarctica.  I’m still trying to reach my goal of blogs from every state. 

Initially, there were a lot of articles from the Home & Garden sections of regional publications that were great as fillers, but as the number of blogs increased, I dropped them and the site is now purely garden blogs.  I was also asked to blog on the page but I found it too difficult to maintain multiple blogs.  I gradually stopped blogging and commenting.  I really wanted the focus on the blogs themselves.

Caren White, editor of Garden Voices, also operates A Gardening Year, works another job and volunteers at Rutgers Gardens, where she’s pictured here
Photo: Mary Anne MacMillan

HFP: How did you come to be involved in it? And how do you maintain the site?

CW: Josh contacted me initially in November 2005 about adding my blog to the page.  Then he asked me if I would be willing to be the editor.  I did a post about my initial involvement. 

His original estimate of 1 to 2 hours a day to update the page was right on the money.  I was expected to update once a day, Monday through Friday.  I’m an overachiever, so I try to update twice a day, seven days a week.  Each update takes about an hour.  I check the feed to see all the new posts, skim them for content, “snip” them, tag them and then publish them through Movable Type software.  All of this was set up and is maintained by iVillage/GardenWeb.  I have no control over anything except the blog contents.

What took up a lot of my time initially was hunting for blogs to add.  I would spend 2 to 3 additional hours a day surfing the web, reading blogs and emailing bloggers asking if they would like to add their blogs.  Two things I asked for to help bloggers find me, was an “Add Your Blog” link on Garden Voices and a button for bloggers to add to their blogs.  They did add the link to the sidebar, but when the email addresses changed after NBC bought iVillage last year, the address on the link was never updated.  Development of a button for bloggers to use on their blogs was started, but never finished.

I’ve stopped recruiting blogs for the page due to space limitations.  The template is frozen at 40 entries.  There are already too many blogs to be able to fit everyone’s posts every day.  I requested an increase from 40 entries but was told that Garden Voices is not a blogroll.  Instead, I should choose “the best” posts of the day and publish those.  I’m not comfortable judging other people’s blogs so instead I publish the first 40 posts in my reader.  Occasionally I get complaints from bloggers that their posts are not appearing.  I always explain why and then make an effort to ensure that their posts get in more regularly.

Despite the fact that the “Add Your Blog” link no longer works, bloggers are still finding me.  They either leave comments on my garden blog or email me.  Here’s a hint to bloggers who want to get on sites like Garden Voices:  have an email address on your blog.  It’s so much easier for someone like me looking to add blogs to a site to be able to email a blogger directly rather than leaving a comment on a post.  If you are concerned about privacy issues, do what I did and have a separate email address for your blog.

I’d also like to do a shout out to Kathy Purdy of Cold Climate Gardening who gives out my email address to bloggers who want to add their blogs to Garden Voices.  Thanks to her, I’ve been able to add some really awesome blogs to the site.

HFP: Have any garden bloggers asked to be removed from the site?

Continue Reading

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Faith, Realism, Enterprise: All in a Mustard Seed

A talisman from the 1960s reaches back two centuries and forward, to this very spring in California.

Sunset on mustard-covered hills, Tepusquet Canyon, California
Photo: Caroline Joyes Woods

“It is so completely covering our hills right now,” writes Caroline Joyes Woods, “that you can smell its honey-with-a-dash-of-fetid (the fetid being just a tiny after-smell) fragrance in the morning when you first come out and the air is still and the moisture still in the air...nice!”

“It” is mustard, and “our hills” are Tepusquet Canyon, near Santa Maria, California, where Caroline and her husband have been ranching for many years. “Nice” and a lot more than that is Caroline herself, a childhood friend, apple tree climber, and moss garden maker.

We contacted her this spring having dimly remembered a human flower project from back in the early 1960s. When we were still in elementary school, Caroline used to wear around her neck a silver chain and glass amulet with a mustard seed encased inside. We went treasure hunting and were thrilled to find one several weeks ago at Uncommon Objects here in Austin. But aside from, now, being souvenirs of childhood, what were these charms all about?

Caroline reminded us that Christ told his disciples “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed-nothing shall be impossible unto you.” (Matthew 17:20) In several of the gospels Jesus also compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed “which a man took, and sowed in his field:
 Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.” (Matthew 13:31-2)

Mustard seed “Remembrancer” and prairie phlox (Phlox pilosa)
Photo: Human Flower Project

Someone turned the parable into a trinket that caught on. A few clicks through ebay (and the trip to Uncommon Objects, too) proved how popular these items once were—though somehow we can’t imagine preteens of today much going for them. It turns out they were manufactured by the Flint Company, a mom and pop operation in Kansas City.  In Richard Weiss’s book The American Myth of Success, we learn about Maurice and Alice Flint, a Missouri couple who had fallen on hard times after World War II. They consulted Norman Vincent Peale, a leading pop-religious figure of the time (Dr. Phil, Billy Graham, and Donald Trump rolled into one).

Weiss writes that it was Peale “who advised them to repeat the following New Testament injunction whenever they felt despondent: ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed…nothing shall be impossible unto you.’ Flint asked his wife for a mustard seed to carry as a reminder, and she obliged with one from the family pickle jar. One day, feeling low, he reached into his pocket for the seed, but it was gone.” He then struck on the idea of capturing a mustard seed in a protective container and started making costume jewelry. “The Remembrancer,” as he dubbed it, “was advertised a ‘Symbol of faith – a genuine mustard seed enclosed in sparkling glass, makes a bracelet with real meaning.’”

Remembrancer pin and cards from the Flint Co.
Photo: Collectible Jewels

The Flints opened a charm factory and did very well, it appears; according to Peale, “These articles sold like hot cakes.") “The Remembrancer” was being marketed at least by 1951, and Caroline was wearing hers in 1964. A good streak.

The mustard seed also makes an appearance in Buddhist legend, and, as you might guess, conveys a very different message.

A woman named Kisa Gotami was wandering in grief, after the death of her only child. “Her sorrow was so great that many thought she had already lost her mind.” Pleading for help, she went to the Buddha, who promised to bring her son back to life—if she could gather “white mustard seeds from a family where no-one had died. She desperately went from house to house, but to her disappointment, every house had someone who had died. Finally the realization struck her that there is no house free from death.” She was renewed, and comforted, and continued on the path toward enlightenment. (We don’t know if the Remembrancer ever caught on among Buddhists.)

Are these the same story or contradictory stories? Can “When you wish upon a star” be the same as “Wake up and smell the mustard”? We’re not sure, but Caroline seems to have found faith and truth in bloom together—“honey-with-a-dash-of-fetid.” Nice going, old friend!

Friday, April 25, 2008

A Tall Order—Large Stature Trees

What lengths would you go to for shade, good drainage, and year ‘round beauty? Urban arborist Georgia Silvera Seamans explains the benefits of tall trees and ways to plant these giants successfully in cities. Thank you, Georgia.

Cycle path, Lincoln Parkway, Buffalo
Source: Heartland

By Georgia Silvera Seamans

The “Right Tree in the Right Place” (RTRP) concept encourages municipalities, NGOs, and homeowners to plant trees shorter than 25 feet under overhead utility lines. The crowns of large stature trees, encroaching on wires, can cause a number of problems: downed branches that interrupt utility service, tree trimmers’ perilous contact with live wires, and the conventional pruning of tree crowns into U-shapes (these tend to be structurally unsound and are nearly always unattractive).

Consequently, following RTRP along roads and in neighborhoods with overhead wires yields a short canopy. Redbud, purpleleaf plum, crape myrtle, “flowering” cherry, crabapple, Japanese lilac, and trident and hedge maples, these small stature trees both look and function differently than do streetscapes of large trees like elm, London plane tree, sweet gum, tulip tree, ginkgo, oak, and linden.

Let’s consider some of those differences.

Setback trees on private property create sidewalk shade.  Berkeley, CA.
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans

The aesthetic contribution of short stature trees tends to be limited to their flowering season, while the arching canopy effect of larger stature trees is a year-round feature. Also, short canopies, while beneficial to wildlife, produce smaller ecosystem benefits.  (See “Street Trees: Let’s Think Outside the Wires.” Short stature trees have tremendous habitat and food value.  Take urban birds.  They utilize different layers of the urban forest canopy. As Julie Zickefoose writes in Natural Gardening for Birds, short stature hawthorns provide berries, while larger stature ashes and locusts provide nesting.)

Here are other benefits provided by larger stature trees:

• They provide more shade for infrastructure like streets: “shade on the street segment with large-stature trees will reduce costs for repaving by $2,900 (58%) over the 30-year period compared to the unshaded street. Shade from the small-stature trees is projected to save only $829 (17%)” (From Why Shade Streets? by the Center for Urban Forest Research, 2006).

• In terms of air pollution, “the annual net reductions for pollutants range from 10.1 lbs for a 40-year-old large tree to 0.7 lbs for a 40-year-old small tree. And values range from $64 for a 40-year-old large tree to $1.62 for a 40-year-old small tree” (Center for Urban Forest Research, newsletter, January 2005).

To learn more, here are three good resources (al pdf files): the CUFR’s 2003 newsletter “The case for the large tree”; 2001 Factsheet #1 about the benefits of large front yard trees; and Dr. Greg McPherson’s 2003 article, “A benefit–cost analysis of ten street tree species in Modesto, California, U.S.,” published in the Journal of Arboriculture.

Another deficit of the Right Tree for the Right Place formulation is its ignorance of design factors.  Street trees are typically planted at the street edge of the sidewalk.  Wires are generally sited towards the edge of the sidewalk, too.  With this inevitable conflict for over space, streets with overhead wires are usually planted with short stature trees.  But, street trees could be planted on the building side of the sidewalk or in front yards (preferably through an easement so that the city has some oversight about removals).  There are actually several such “setback” programs in the U.S.  The City of Boston Parks Department sponsors one, (and is enabled to do so according to Massachusetts General Law).  Public trees can be planted on private property as long as they are within 15 feet of the public right of way.  EarthWorks Projects in Boston, MA, initiated the Setback Trees Project in 2007, self-described as planting “trees on private property for the common good.”

Bumpout (note this bumpout is not connected to the sidewalk) – tree is just outside overhead wires.  Berkeley, CA
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans

There are other design possibilities.  Trees could be planted in bump-outs located beyond overhead wires, in traffic circles at neighborhood intersections, or in the center of neighborhood blocks (see photo below).  (Traffic calming is one co-benefit of planting trees in the center of the roadway or at an intersection.)

And overhead wires could be buried.  This is an expensive proposition; according to The Seattle Times, the cost to the city of burying utility wires for a local project was $350-$400 per linear foot.  In another Washington community, the cost of burying electric, phone, and cable wires was estimated at $2500 per foot.

However, tall urban street canopies provide considerable benefits long-term.  The conflict between large stature trees and overhead wires is not new.  In his fascinating book, Republic of Shade, about the American elm (Ulmus americana) in New England, Thomas J. Campanella describes anti-elm sentiments expressed in an 1853 article from the New York Times:

“Most American cities were in urgent need of a pruning.  Larger, ‘weedy’ species should be removed at once, (the Times writer) argued, and replaced with smaller trees ‘of a character that can be trained around the wires.’ Elms, very big and very weedy, must be sacrificed to appease the goddess of electricity.”

Appeasing the gods of electricity: large trees pruned into u’s under wires on Old Brownsboro Road, Louisville, KY
Photo: Human Flower Project

Campanella also notes that changes in road technology affected trees.  Street surfaces before 1890 did not restrict “the passage of water, nutrients, or oxygen to the roots of adjacent trees,” but asphalt and concrete paving “virtually sealed the surface of the street,” depriving trees of all three. 

Another dimension of “Right Tree in the Right Place” is to select species according to the size of the growing area—most often the square foot of the sidewalk cutout or width of the tree lawn (the grass strip located within the sidewalk).  This is a very reasonable concept.  Healthy trees depend on adequate root systems, which requires sufficient area to grow.  Often, according to landscape architect and arborist James Urban, we look up at tree crowns and ignore what’s happening below ground.

Different cities have different standards.  In the City of Boston, the minimum tree well area is 24 square feet, often a 3x8 foot or 4x6 foot sidewalk cutout.  One East Bay, California city’s minimum standard is 2x2 feet or 4 square feet!  Generally speaking, a foot of root area supports an inch of trunk diameter.  Accordingly, at only four inches in diameter at breast height, a tree with a well area of 4 square feet has maximized the initial growing area for its root system.  This tree will seek additional space either within the sidewalk (made visible by buckling) or in someone’s front yard.

A small cutout clearly will restrict the size of the tree that can be planted initially.  For example, a 2x2 foot area cannot adequately accommodate a tree that is two inches in diameter whose root ball is two feet in diameter.  On average, for every diameter inch at planting, a tree needs a year to establish.  So, a two inch tree will take two years to establish.  Although, a 15-gallon tree (the size frequently planted in a 2x2 foot cutout) will establish faster, its aesthetic and functional presence is less significant than a larger diameter tree.

The 2x2 foot area is the minimum, so presumably a larger growing area will be provided if the sidewalk can accommodate it.  Although a 3x8 or 4x6 space is significantly larger, it can only support a 24-inch diameter tree within the original cutout.  Ideally, street trees would be given larger growing areas for their root systems.  However, if the sidewalk is space constrained (Americans with Disabilities law requires four feet of clearance for accessibility), what are the options? 

Annie’s Oak, Berkeley, CA
Photo: Georgia Silvera Seamans

One option is to install structural soil beneath the sidewalk.  Structural soil is an engineered medium that supports root growth while simultaneously satisfying engineering load-bearing requirements.  The most well known structural soil recipe was developed by Cornell University’s Urban Horticulture Institute.  An older version of structural soil is sand-based, also known as Amsterdam structural soil.  The most significant difference is that CU soils can achieve a greater level of compaction (important for load bearing) and still sustain root systems than can the Amsterdam soil – 95% versus 85-90%.  The installation of structural soils could be undertaken as sidewalks are repaired, redone, or created.  Like the burying of overhead utility wires, this solution is costly, but again, the potential benefits to a city, its trees, streets and people are significant. 

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Geobotany: Rocking the Garden World

Nature first put flowers on stone pedestals, but gardeners of the Picturesque school followed, with painterly landscapes of their own. Well done, say the EarthScholars: But, please, give rocks equal time!

Trees, Fort Greene Park, 2004
by Kerry O’Neill

By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group

Unwittingly, people view landscapes through the lenses of their prior knowledge and experiences. They compare the new landscapes they visit with ones they already know.  Given that more than half of the world’s inhabitants now live in big cities, more and more people lack an extensive personal knowledge of nature. Nor have most people, urban or otherwise, traveled to explore a variety of conserved natural ecosystems —experiences they could use in making comparisons and aesthetic decisions about the new landscapes they encounter.

There are many theories about how humans perceive landscapes. The Australian environmental scholar Andrew Lothian poses the question: Is landscape quality inherent in the landscape or in the eye of the beholder? He opts to defend the latter.

R.P. Taylor, writing in the journal Leonardo, recalls that, “In art school I was told that Monet’s water lilies calm the observer, while van Gogh’s sunflowers electrify. To what extent, however, do paintings [of landscapes] really affect the observer’s physical condition? The foundations of this question date back to 1890, when the connection between psychological states and physiological states was first considered.”

A famous African Savannah,
the Maasai Mara
Photo: Masai Mara

Judith Heerwagen, in her article on the Psychosocial Value of Space, notes: “Drawing on habitat selection theory, ecologist Gordon Orians argues that humans are psychologically adapted to and prefer landscape features that characterized the African savannah, the presumed site of human evolution….If the ‘savannah hypothesis’ is true, we would expect to find that humans intrinsically like and find pleasurable environments that contain key features of the savannah that were most likely to have aided our ancestors’ survival and well-being.”

Features of the savannah landscape include a fairly unobstructed “big sky” view, a high diversity of flowering plants, scattered clusters of trees with high canopies, swaths of open grassland, occasional rocky outcrops, multiple visual corridors, and topographic changes to enhance predator surveillance and long-distance escape movements.

Do humans really prefer these, or other, particular landscapes? History shows us that colonialists and emigrants sometimes attempted to transform their new landscapes of residence into replicas of those they had known. Presuming the superiority of “The Old Country,” they tried to mimic what they considered “civilized spaces”—importing plants, seeds, and even rocks from their landscapes of origin.

Just as people’s first maps showed their tribes or cities at the center of the world, it is common for us all to judge new landscapes by the rather xenophobic criteria of familiarity and congruence with our original cultural values and preferences.

In 18th century England, complex debates developed about the essence of beauty in the landscape--with followers of the ‘Sublime’ school inspired by wild, natural landscapes (simultaneously fascinating and startling), while those of the ‘Picturesque’ school wanted ‘painterly’ landscape views (human-designed to be blurred, disjointed, and soft composites of color and contour).

Followers of the latter were willing to have flowering plants moved from their traditional positions in borders or against walls, provided they were regrouped to form non-linear, painterly compositions (“painting with plants”). The eye of the landscape artist (painter), with its aesthetic understanding of nature and training in the principles of composition, was thought to be the best guide to good planting design.

Plant Hunter Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Rhododendrons of the Sikkim-Himalaya (1849-51)
Image: Garden Visit

The Picturesque school had a pronounced effect on landscape design. It both justified using foreign plants in British gardens and provided a system of compositional principles to harmonize the intermingling of exotic and native plants and natural objects. Instead of the plantings being natural of themselves, landscape designers were to use art to imitate rugged natural scenes in aesthetic ways.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the Picturesque Style was used, for example, in the making of woodland gardens. Landowners on the western shores of the British Isles installed rhododendron woods, arranged in “painterly compositions.” As can be seen from Hooker’s print (above), the art that inspired Paxton’s landscape (below), making effective use of jagged irregular lines of plant and rocks, represents the furthest possible conceptual distance from an artificial geometrical regularity. In contrast, fractal geometric patterns predominate—for both plants and rocks.

Landscape at England’s Birkenhead Park, Designed by Joseph Paxton
Photo: Garden Visit

Like Charles Darwin, Joseph Dalton Hooker saw the need to integrate botany and geology to understand nature. When he was only 5 years old, Joseph regularly attended his father’s botanical lectures at the University of Glasgow, and displayed a genuine interest in the subject. Because his parents thought Glasgow High School’s curriculum was too limited, he and his brother were withdrawn from formal schooling to be home-schooled. In those days, botany was still regarded as merely a branch of medicine, so like every other young Glaswegian botanist in his day, Hooker studied for his medical degree at the University of Glasgow. This education later proved to be quite expedient because, in 1839, Sir James Clark Ross, famous discoverer of the magnetic north pole as well as his father’s good friend, offered young Joseph the position of Assistant Surgeon on Clark’s expedition to the Antarctic, aboard the discovery ships Erebus and Terror.

This four-and-half-year voyage allowed Hooker to botanize in many lands and also to notice the natural relationships between botany and geology. At the Kerguelen Islands, where Captain Cook had managed to collect just 20 new species of plants, Joseph identified and collected over 150 different species, including flowering plants, 3 ferns, 35 mosses, and the rest lichens and seaweeds. This was no easy task, as the cold, harsh weather and rough terrain made collecting very challenging. Hooker wrote: “Many of my best little lichens were gathered by hammering out the tufts, or sitting on them till they thawed.” Joseph later became assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, near London.

One result of the English affinity for Picturesque landscape design was an enthusiasm for rock gardens. A European rock garden, also known as an alpine garden, features extensive use of rocks or stones, along with plants native to rocky alpine or tundra environments. 

Alpine flowers on tundra along Trail Ridge road
Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
Photo: Q.T. Luong

In 1803, Europe’s first alpine garden was constructed at Belvedere Castle in Vienna. The best rock gardens were designed and built to look like natural outcrops of bedrock (e.g., limestone, sandstone). Stones were aligned to suggest a bedding plane and plants were often used to conceal the joints between the stones. This type of garden was especially popular in Victorian England as well.

The first rock garden of appreciable size to be constructed at an American botanic garden opened at Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 1917. Today, some of the best alpine rock gardens may be viewed at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Scotland; Le Jardin Botanique Alpin du Lautaret, Grenoble, France; Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Cambridge, England; Royal Horticultural Society Garden, Wisley, England; New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, NY; Devonian Botanic Garden, Devon, Alberta, Canada; Göteborg Botanical Garden, Gothenburg, Sweden; Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, Vail, Colorado; Jardin Botanique de Montrèal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; and the Tromso Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden, Tromso, Norway.

A Picturesque rock garden at Chatsworth Manor, England
Photo: Michelle Anstett

Although the use of rocks as decorative and symbolic elements in gardens can be traced back to very early Chinese and Japanese gardens, rock gardens dedicated to growing alpine plants have a shorter history. During the age of the great plant explorers (basically, the 1800s) there was great interest in the exotic discoveries being brought back to England, and people wanted to grow these amazing new treasures successfully. Although others had previously written about growing alpine plants, it was actually Reginald Farrer who, with the 1919 publication of his two-volume book The English Rock Garden, rocked the gardening world for the first time. There was great interest in Farrer’s method and approach to creating large-scale, naturalistic settings for growing alpine plants.

(For more about the man credited with starting the rock gardening craze, read Nicola Shulman’s biography of Farrer).

Alpine Crevice Garden
Alpine Garden Society Center
Pershore, Worcestershire, England
Photo: Stone Garden

Because our own research group focuses on the integration of botanical and geological knowledge, we strongly recommend that public rock gardens interpret both the plants and the rocks that are present. The public trails we have designed always include geobotanical interpretation. As visitors tread the rock garden’s paths examining the alpine plants, we think it is helpful for the visitors to understand the geologic history of any garden site, to know what kind of rocks they are seeing and their influences on plant growth.

We appreciate, for example, University of Florence’s Botanical Garden exhibit that interprets the geobotany of the alpine plants of Italy’s Dolomite region via a simulated outcrop of limestone derived from the Dolomite Mountains themselves. Similarly, we think the rock garden at the Botanic Garden of Montreal is exemplary from a geobotanical perspective. It’s not only a rock garden, but also a mineralogical garden, with rocks and minerals drawn from all over Canada.

Finally, if you live in the US, be sure to experience the Denver Botanic Garden’s remote 1.5-mile Walter Pesman Trail through the alpine tundra on Mount Goliath, a mountain peak section of the Mount Evans area within the Arapaho National Forest (17 miles from Idaho Springs). Volunteer guides will interpret not only the plants but also the rocks that you see in this “nature-made” alpine rock garden, but only during the summertime days when the alpine flowers are in bloom, June 26th to August 7th. (Reservations are required: phone 720-865-3539). The Denver Botanic Garden within the city also has a fine rock garden, with thousands of different rockery plants collected by Panayoti Kelaidis--the godfather of American rock gardening.

We conclude with a passage from author Donna E. Schaper: “Building a quiet [sanctuary] of stones and plants, slowly and meditatively over time, is [a rock garden’s] true meaning. Process over product, journey over destination, forever a work in progress—rock is the best metaphor we have of everlastingness.”

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Carmen: Red Hot, Yellow Acacias

The original bad girl, Bizet’s gypsy heroine, casts a floral spell, but why do opera productions always get her bewitching blossom wrong?

Francesca Zambello as Carmen, Royal Opera House, 2008
Photo: Telegraph

Seeing the opera Carmen for the first time this past Friday, we met Amy Winehouse’s great-great grandmother.  The lady with churning hips and long black hair, on the loose while her boyfriend keeps winding up in jail, first came along 150 years ago. Georges Bizet was inspired to compose his opera after reading of this femme fatale in Prosper Merimee’s novella published in 1845. Look out!

‘’She was wearing a very short red skirt which revealed white silk stockings with more than one hole in them, and dainty red morocco leather shoes tied with flame-colored ribbons. She wore her mantilla lowered in order to show off her shoulders and a big bouquet of acacia at the opening of her blouse. She also had an acacia flower in the corner of her mouth, and she walked swaying her hips like a filly on a Cordova stud farm.”
—from Prosper Merimee’s Carmen

That flower, as opera buffs know, has its own role in the drama.

Franco Corelli as Don Jose, in jail,
in love with the wrong woman
(and holding the wrong flower)
Photo: Sandy’s Opera Gallery

A squadron of French soldiers, stationed in Sevilla, Spain, is killing time outside a cigarette factory. The working girls come out for a smoke break, and all the guys go apoplectic for the brash and gorgeous Carmen. She winks and sings, sidling up to a few of them. After teasing the whole regiment, she at last tosses her “acacia” flower to a standoffish sergeant, Don Jose, who tucks the blossom inside his uniform.

He’s a goner, of course. Carmen soon gets into a nasty girlfight (marvelously staged by Austin Lyric Opera, with many fistsful of convincing hair-pulling). The smitten Don Jose helps her escape arrest, and for his trouble gets thrown in prison.

In Act II, our hero is released and finds Carmen dancing on tabletops and flirting with a bullfighter in a bar on the edge of town. He prepares to tell her off – or worse—but reaching inside his coat, pulls the blossom out. (In last Friday performance, it was a pink fragile thing that shattered right on cue.) And so begins his aria.

La fleur que tu m’avais jetée,
Dans ma prison m’était restée.
Flétrie et séche, cette fleur
Gardait toujours sa douce odeur…

The flower that you tossed to me
Stayed with me in my prison.
This flower, withered and dry,
Never lost its sweet perfume.

As Don Jose clutches his flower and pledges his love, Carmen gazes off. For the first and only time in the drama, she seems concerned, maybe confused is more like it, confused by tenderness.

Acacia retinoides:
relative of Don Jose’s floral love charm
Photo: Floracyberia

Meanwhile, we ask, what is a red flower doing on stage? Acacia blooms are bright yellow!

From looking around, it seems a very common mistake by the props managers for this opera. Carmen’s temper and the Andalusian setting make red roses or carnations the obvious choice, that is to say, cliché.

But acacia, often called “mimosa” in southern France, has a lot more to offer here than mere faithfulness to Merimee’s story.

In the 19th Century, when both the fictional and operatic “Carmens” were born, several species of acacia were imported from Australia to Southern France and became hugely popular both as landscape plants and cut flowers. Hundreds were planted as ornamentals around the homes of wealthy English and Parisian vacationers, who escaped to the Cote d’Azur in winter. Happily the mimosas bloomed as early as December, a relief from all that gray.

A wreath of acacia in Provence, along the Mimosa Trail

Today’s travelers in Provence take the Mimosa Trail in February through Rayol Canadel, Ste. Maxime, and Tanneron (a major acacia growing center) to Cannes Mandelieu (Merimee’s old stomping grounds), and finally the perfume industry capitol of Grasse.

As well as scenting Don Jose’s uniform, acacia farnesiana is the major ingredient in many perfumes, among them Mimosa pour Moi, and L’Eau d’Azur. “Fragrances in which mimosa plays a vital part, but is not the main theme of the fragrance, include Farnesiana by Caron, Chanel Nº 5, Moment Suprême by Jean Patou, ... Paris by Yves St Laurent, Byzance by Rochas, Amarige by Givenchy as well as Summer by Kenzo.” One source describes the acacia scent as “sweet, heady, almondy.”

Placido Domingo sings Don Jose’s aria in Carmen, with faux acacia blooms, in a 1978 production by the Vienna State Opera, filmed by Franco Zefferelli

If you’d like to hear what melted Carmen’s heart (temporarily), here are a few fine tenors singing “La Fleur que Tu M’Avais Jetee” (The Flower Song). Jussi Bjorling clutches a rose bud. Franco Tenelli fumbles something red. But, here is Placido Domingo in 1978, performing with the Vienna State Opera AND some round yellow flowers, acacia at last. Leave it to the Austrians to get the flowers right! Bravo.